Ack! Blogging!

Ok -- so the summer (my summer) is officially over.  And so I should get back to this blogging gig.  And before I do let me just say how incredibly impressed I am by all of the book bloggers who manage to blog daily!  The reading part I have down, the blogging, not so much.

So for this post I will try and get caught up on my summer reads.  I am only linking to the two I really liked. 

Alice Bliss, by Laura Harrington -- sobbing on metronorth.  A really great book about an adolescent girl in....Rochester NY!....and her life after her father is deployed to Iraq.  Excellent mother/daughter depiction.  Excellent young adult protagonist who is by no means perfect -- but she is  trying to do what she thinks that she should, for her family and herself.  Harrington gets the weather -- the grey grey cold winter days and the slush totally right (even though I-95 does not lead into downtown Rochester).  This book was excellent. 

The Known World, by Edward P. Jones -- Finally made it through -- again assigned this semester.  Hopefully my students won;t have the same problem falling asleep that I did (and it is good!)

The Fall of the Towers. Samuel Delaney -- pretty good, not great.  Perfectly enjoyable, but I am not sure I cared that much about what happened.  I thought I would like it better.

The Color of the Sea, by John Hamamura -- Loved, loved, loved this.  Bought for a quarter at the Beaver Island library sale.  Thought one of my people would like it, but not appropriate, yet.  Starts with a 9 year old boy in the 1930s going from Japan to Hawaii with his father, who works on a sugar plantation.  Samurai training (that is why I thought my person would like it), sugar plantation work, whites and native Hawaiians and Japanese, ill advised teenage sex, moving to California, better advised teenage sex, WWII and on.....It is both sweeping, but also detailed enough in the right parts to feel as if you have a handle on the main character.  Definitely I would recommend this.

Eden Close, by Anita Shreve -- eh, Anita Shreve -- maybe I had read it before, hard to know.

The Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson -- finally made it to my reread of this -- really loved it, even though it took a solid 10 days (and vacation days).  I still feel as if I need the Companion to Years of Rice and Salt to fully enjoy -- has anyone written that?

The Selected, by Patrick Cave -- the sequel to Sharp North.  Really good, but hmmmm  has a televised game to the death and seems to have been published prior to Hunger Games.

Eutopia, by David Nickle -- so incredibly terrible.  This is why books should tell you very clearly "I made be called eutopia and I may claim to be set in a 'utopian mill town' but I also include disgusting horror book creatures crawling out of the dark and so if you don;t like horror don't even bother."

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak -- my mom bought me this when I admitted I had not read it.  Actually way better than I expected.  Death is a surprisingly sympathetic narrator.

Learning to Swim, by Sara Henry -- this came up on someone's blog..Bookslut??...It was fine for the first half and then so incredibly far fetched for the second that it was absurd.

Kindred, by Octavia Butler -- a reread, and my least favorite of Butler's books.  But I am teaching it and it is pretty good, as long as you don't think about her (much better) books.

Currently reading Weird Sisters.  They need to get way weirder pretty quickly.

Reading but not blogging

This week I have finished Eden and read Raising Cain and skimmed a book I will not be using for a class in the fall.  And I am working my way through The Known World, which I will be using in class, and am now reading and enjoying Let the Great World Spin, on the suggestion (surprising) of my sister.

After Eden I think I shall take a break from depressing and incredibly long Israeli novels.  This one made me like the David Grossman one better.  So is it better to reflect directly on "the situation" in your novel or to seemingly ignore it until it infects every pore of every character's miserable life?  Hard to say.  But Eden is no eden (which I should have known) and I wish people would be more generous with their quotation marks when using the word "utopian."  I thought it might actually be utopian.  It was not.  Not only that, but many loose ends are not at all tied up -- and by not being tied up it is clear that the misery that the reader knows about will only be compounded by the misery that is yet to come when the characters (all living their lives beyond the book's pages for me) find out.

As for Raising Cain -- I clearly missed this when it came out -- I read it on the suggestion of a teacher at the people's school -- I did learn some useful things (how to frame discussions about fear and how to encourage emotional intelligence through discussions of people and literary characters), and I was glad to finish it in a few hours becuase it would have been an annoying read over a longer period of time.

And hopefully The Known World will not make my students fall asleep quite as quickly as it is making me....

You will all note that I am taking a hiatus from Red Mars.  I need a summer sci-fi read as good as Sherri Tepper's The Margarets.  Any suggestions?  (Well, well, well, it seems as if Tepper has a new book AND it is postapocalyptic: The Waters Rising.)

Not really a post.....

So on the night stand are:

Dead Tossed Waves -- finished, not as good as the first -- she does have great titles and the last one (The Dark and Hollow Places) I will likely also read.
Our only May Amelia -- a book of my female person's -- not bad, girl in Washington State in 1899 and does show that young people are fully capable of complicated emotional lives
Red Mars -- Kim Stanley Robinson -- wow -- lots of people in my utopian crowd coo over this series and all I can say is that no one cares this much about the make-up of Martian rock.  I need some human interaction!  Not sure when I will finish this.
Aurora -- last in the trilogy and highly satisfying postapocalyptic young adult fare -- ordered the most recent one from the UK and it was worth the 10$ shipping charge (and I hate paying a shipping charge).  But start witrh Exodus and Zenith.  But I warn you -- Julie Bertagna's website infected my computer with some odd virus!

And these are the two I am about to start:

Under the Harrow -- cannot even remember why I took this one out of the library.
Eden -- have not yet started, but it sounded intriguing.

Cranky

I will not be blogging about Copper Elephant this week as my saved copy of Room showed up in the library.

Many bloggers and book reviewers have been in a kerfluffle about Emma Donoghue's Room.  It seems that this book is universally loved -- and yet I felt the same way in the first half of this book as I did when reading V.C. Andrews Flowers in the Attic, except that then I was 14 and even that voyeuristic horror-thrill was not particularly satisfying.  So here are my three reasons why Room is not a great book, although a perfectly engaging read (thereby giving it the airplane reading score of a 7 [although that could be a 6.8 if you have a long flight -- this is good for the Charleston-LaGuardia route -- but it won't last for that flight to the West Coast]):

1)  Reviewers seems to love the voice of the 5 year old narrator -- and there is something intriguing about seeing his world (and then our world) through his eyes.  But that voice can be frustrating and limiting -- particularly by the end when you really would like to know more about what his mother is thinking and not simply what she is willing to say to her son.  This is the reason why the word "gimmick" seems to appear in almost every review.

2) The voyeurism -- I would like not to read a book that taps into that part of my brain/psyche that reads People magazine stories about Elizabeth Smart.  The book itself was written in the aftermath of a case about a woman who was held captive by her father for 24 years.  So there is voyeurism at all ends -- the book was created out of a voyeuristic interest in one woman's horrific life experiences and then the book attract readers who want to read about such horrific experiences.  But we get that horror through the eyes and brain of a five year old for whom Room is normal -- a voice where Outside is nothing but space and TV is wholly imaginary and Wardrobe is a safe place to sleep when Old Nick comes to call late at night.  While I kept reading I hated this horror/normal reality that the book was presenting.

3) And then there are the "mother's love" responses.  I reject out of hand any use of rape/torture/confinement as setting up conditions for an argument about the endless depths of mother love.  Let us be clear that rape/torute/confinement are exactly as they sound.  Let us not rationalize them with any claim about what a great mother Ma is -- it is not about whether or not she is a great mother -- because what she is is confined, raped, tortured.  We learn nothing about motherhood from this book because we should not learn anything about motherhood from this book.  Can people parent under conditions of extreme deprivation? Absolutely.  Do we hold such people in high esteem?  Absolutely.  Do we seek to learn from their experiences?  We do not.  First of all it would be the height of absurdity to make any claim about what you can learn when you are not in such an experience of extreme degradation.  But more importantly it would be morally wrong for any of us to say: see what a great job Ma did even while being raped and confined! as some sort of message to other women experiencing abuse in their domestic lives.   I would say (controversially) that Ma is absent any obligations to her son because of her confinement and continued rape.  Is it better for Jack that she cares for him as she does?  Yes.  But is she required morally to have done so?  No.

Martyrdom is not a model of motherhood.

So should you read Room?  Well you will get to join in on all the discussions, but if you also thought that The Lovely Bones was a manipulative book that made you want to take a very long shower, then I would not bother.

One no, one maybe, one wait until next week

Currently reading:  Copper Elephant, by Adam Rapp
Will not be discussing: The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano (which I would recommend if you were interested in a book about the two most unhappy people in the world)
Will be discussing: Lucy by Laurence Gonzales

I will begin this post with a secret admission:  I love Michael Crichton (almost as much as I love Stephen King).  I love the bizarre scenarios and the pseudo-science and the fast pace and the ginormous length.  So Lucy had "in the tradition of Mary Shelley and Michael Crichton"  on the back and I said "yes, please.".

Bonobo researcher (Jenny), insurgents in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, daring escape through the forest, detours to alert the british researcher who was never very friendly, researcher found dead, but his 14 year old daughter (Lucy) on the floor of their home with her arms around dead bonobo.  Jenny takes the daughter and returns to the US.....with Lucy, the 1/2 bonobo child.  [Now is the time for a long tangent about how terrible jacket copy is -- this would be a far cooler book if you did not know that Lucy was part bonobo....the reader should find out when Jenny finds out -- but instead we know from the jacket.  The long and tiring and yet really quite good David Grossman novel I dicussed earlier included a piece of information on the jacket that is not revealed until the halfway point of the book.  Part of my narcolepsy with the first part of the book is waiting to figure out how what I already know can be true.  Someone out there in the publishing world should do something about this.  And while you are at it do something about ridiculous movie previews (really you had to give the world's biggest hint in the preview for Never Let me Go that they are clones??]

Ok, where were we....in Chicago with Lucy and Jenny.  Lucy who has never lived anywhere but the jungle....the best parts of this book are the Mean Girls style high school scenes, minus the gossip, the plastics, and the mean girls.  Eventually all sorts of things happen and while you are never on the edge of your seat, you do want all to work out in the end.  And I am not sure that they do, because, sadly, the novel breaks down in the last 25 pages. 

So if I was giving scores I guess I would give this a 6.5 * -- good for a plane ride, but if you leave it on the seat next to you with 25 pages to go -- don't bother rushing back to find it.  (So a question to my reader(s): how do I put the little asterisk at my new rating system  with a footnote to explain how it will work?)

Update -- answer from comments: do it manually! 

So here is my scale  (all books listed on my bookroll are either 9s or 10s):

*   the scale coordinates with well-known authors clearly at each level (ha! so it is an entirely idiosyncratic scale!  The primary rule about this scale is that: it is my blog and I get to be as judgmental as I wish [iimbaigtbajaiw]

 1: offensive books that I hated, i.e. silly mommy war novels [it would be good to have an example, but I already said I hated it]
2: genres that annoy me -- fantasy (unless it doesn't), historical, steampunk
3: tedious boy books, i.e Philip Roth
4: entertaining books that other people push that I won't read: Swedish crime fiction
5: one step above entertaining books that other people push on me: Like Water for Elephants
6:  books that are needlessly depressing, or confusing, or sleep inducing, that nevertheless I finish:  I would put David Grossman's See Under Love here, but I never finished it....
7: The perfect airplane book sufficiently distracting to keep me from wondering how it is that a plane stays in flight: Ken Follett (thus violating rules 1 and 2!  Remember -- idiosyncratic)
8: Excellent books that maybe go off track; or books I should like better, but am too shallow to love:  Philip K. Dick and other sci fi written by males that does not fall into the offensive category, and yet this is a malleable category: Orson Scott Card -- love the books, yet so offensive....)
9: Books I want to teach and worry when students do not also love: Ursula Le Guin (minus the unreadable Always Coming Home) plus books I would not teach and yet re-read.
10:  Books I love love, i.e.Octavia Butler (except for Kindred)

Reading the people

So it seems to me that one of the items on the good parent list would be "reads the books your children are reading."  Of course we all start out reading those books because we are the ones doing the reading!  But once your people take off and read on their own then it is up to the parent to decide: am I in or out?  Theoretically I think we should be in: by reading what our children read we can both keep tabs on potential pitfalls and get another clue about how our people think.  On the pitfalls -- a few summers ago when Harriet the Spy was popular we did what any sensible family would do -- get all the other books written by Louise Fitzhugh and so the girl child started reading The Long Secret and the boy child started reading Sport.  At this point we would read with the people maybe 1/3 of the time -- so some days they would read to themselves and other days we would read to them.  So I was the one reading when a police officer in Sport used the n-word.  But the girl child had to ask me what menstruation was from one of her reading alone nights.  While the n-word made Sport unacceptable reading for a rising 2nd grader, the menstruation part was not problematic except that it was of no interest to my reader -- and so here the lesson was: read, or at least pay attention to, the books your people read just to keep tabs on the issues that come up (my uncle gave me a 'teen in the french revolution' novel when I turned 12 that included my first enounter with the "string of pearls" phenomenon -- I did not fully understand, except to know that I should not ask my mother).

The opportunity is that by reading what your people read you gain insight into their largely opaque heads.  And yet....I dislike fantasy....one of my people loves the fanatsy: the dragons, the elves, the endless battles, the inexplicable places and spaces.  And I don't wish to read these books.  But to only read the books I am interested in that my people read may be a bad move.  But this week I did just that -- avoiding the fantasy that I have promised I will read (The Looking Glass Wars) I instead read Betti on the High Wire by Lisa Railsbeck.  Babo, who will be renamed Betti by her adoptive parents, is the child of circus performers killed in a nameless war in a nameless country.  Babo has lived as the leader of a group of forgotten children, looked after by Auntie Moo and avoiding soldiers and the potential ministrations of a local missionary woman.  But on occasion adoptive parents come and one day someone wants Babo.  Most of the book is about her adjustment to life in the US.  Written from Babo's perspective the book does a nice job of seeing American life from a radically different perspective.  I disagree with the author's refusal to name Babo's country.  Railsbeck notes in the afterword that she wants her readers to think that Babo's life could be happening in many countries around the world.  I think, instead, that it makes Babo less real -- by being any child she becomes no real child and her home country seems to be little other than the circus that Babo remembers almost as a fantasy.  Babo makes very clear that she does not want to leave her country or her parents (who she thinks are alive -- and my reader also thought the parents were alive, although I thought the text was fairly clear on their death in the war -- this meant my reader was certainly more critical of the idea of foreign adoption).  The adoptive parents are portrayed with a nice mixture of humor and patience and interest in Babo's past (an interest it is hard to satisfy as her country of origin is not named).  My reader described the book as funny and sad.  On the other hand that same reader declared the thoughts in her own head as her own -- and so there went my great moment of insight into reading a book to read my people. 

Perhaps the dragon book will work better.  Shoot.

An actual book!

So I have finished a book not assigned for my classes and without incurring a library fine (well that is not really true, finishing the book did not magically return it to the library, so it will be returned late tomorrow).  David Grossman's To the End of the Land (this is an excellent interview with Grossman), as this is my blog and not a review I will share with you a few thoughts, somewhat random and then perhaps come up with something to say about whether you should read it.  The book tells the story of Ora, who escapes to hike in the Gallilee in order to avoid any notifiers who might come and tell her that her son, serving in the army, is dead.  She hikes with an old friend and lover who was a POW in Egypt 30 years prior to to the novel's main time frame.

So actual book reviews are often filled with these stock phrases and this is a book that calls out for such phrases (the back of the book, which includes excerpts from seven reviews, favors words like "wrenching," "full of anguish" and "passionate" -- and one Israeli paper says this book is the "stamp of maturity upon Israeli literature," which I misread as the "swamp of maturity," which struck me as an intriguing thing to say....alas.).  Ok, so my reviewy phrases will be paired with my actual thoughts in brackets.  The book opens with an utterly captivating first chapter [why? because you could imagine it was the first chapter in a postapocalyptic plague novel -- three young people in an empty hospital and a nameless nurse].  Each chapter reminds the reader of the various forms of pain that humans are capable, and willing, to inflict on one another [to this I responded -- 7 days in a row -- by falling asleep with the book on my head.  Some of this pain is inflicted on the reader: you will not know what is happening, you will not know when it is happening and you will never know why it is happening].  The descriptions of the Israeli landscape are lyrical [and compel me to find out what a terabinth tree looks like and to really find out what a wadi is].  The main character, Ora, is maddening [ok, that is me not my reviewer voice -- reviewers say she is Emma Bovary (pish) and Anna Karenina (posh) and that Grossman has created a "fully alive" character -- actually I found her to be not particulalry alive, she is always in her head,  -- and that is what makes her maddening, and compelling].

So, in all seriousness -- two things I really liked about this book:  first is the telling of a child's life.  Ora describes her family life to Avram and in doing so brings her children to life in words.  She is not just telling funny or not so funny anecdotes.  She tells them into being for Avram and for the reader.  As she tells she remembers more and more about the early years of both of her children (the years you don't remember unless you, unlike me, had the good sense to write things down).   As the world knows, Grossman's son Uri was killed during his army service while Grossman was writing this book.  The book reminds about the work that words can do to bring someone alive. Second is the sense of place -- the geography of Israel (and I have never been and know little about its geographic feel) is palpable and striking -- primarily in contrast to my own sense of the geography of the US.  Most of the book takes place on a hike along the Israel trail -- a comparable hike along the Appalacian trail would not yield quite the same combination of army base, arab village, grocery store, creek, mountain, school group, sheep, shepherd, bedouins, wild dog and coffee.  Nor would it include the multiple plaques dedicated to the memory of soldiers who died.  I suspect some do hike the appalachian trail and make coffee three times a day (and if you are planning such a trip, invite me!) and I have seen cows on the Appalachian trail -- but this description of the Israel trail makes me think about two things: first of all the United States is just huge and its landscape is so incredibly variable and regional and specific.  And second, I am not sure there are very many places (particulalry natural spaces) that I could describe in such detail: having lived in 6 states as an adult I am not sure there is any one landscape that feels particulalry like home.  I could give a fair description of the inland woods of Beaver island, MI or a certain beach in Maine or even Tom, Dick and Harry trail in Oregon -- but I do not have spaces that I return to daily or weekly that I know so well.  This book gives you the sense that Grossman is describing his home -- and it is a home that he knows so intimately in flower and stream and mountain and rock and sound and bird and lizard and flower and fruit trees and people.

And my last thought about the book?  Its take away for me: remember that being right is rarely enough.

Ha!

So, I finished a book that I did not assign for class (and no it is not the long, complicated David Grossman novel of which I have managed 15 pages a night before falling alseep, book on head).  Alison was writing something about Ayelet Waldman and I asked to borrow the book Bad Mother (you should know, reader(s) that I never buy books at Amazon and yet I always link these books to Amazon, why is that?).  In 18 chapters Waldman recounts her marriage, her life as a lawyer and a writer, and her children -- but more than all of this she recounts her experience of being a mother and her obsession with being a "bad" mother.  A bad mother is a mother who is not perfect; and while I appreciate Waldman's argument that we are often inundated with images of maternal perfection as the only ideal, I also think that this theme gets old fast.  Waldman clearly wants credit (amusing dinner party credit) for being a bad mom.  And her writing is not sufficiently amusing to maintain that tone, but after chapter 10 or so she calms down.  And what is clear from then on is not that she is a bad mother (although she, like all the rest of us is imperfect) but that she is an anxious mother.  She is anxious about how her moods will impact her children, how her expectations will distort them, how her hopes will stifle them, how her desire to be her own person and continue loving her husband as the number 1 chosen person in her life will bring the whole family down.  Waldman is, in part, in love with her own anxiety.  But she is also honest about that anxiety. 

Yet, she has strange perceptions about the universe and its role in her life, while she does recount in detail how she has worked through decisions about aborting a child with a genetic, trisomy related, pre-natal diagnosis, and dealing with a son's struggles in school and a daughter's delayed speaking and another son's palate issues (and yes, as those who know me will recognize, let me say here:  she has one million children....i.e. more than 2).  In all of these decisions (most notably about Rocketship, the name the family gave the child she aborted) Waldman speaks honestly about where she is coming from.   But then there is an odd (to me) shift to the universe.  She says in a later chapter, after the main Rocketship chapter (which is Ch11), "as blessed as we had always been, here now the universe had dealt us a shitty hand" (166). (And here I should link to Alison again for a blogpost on that very subject.)   And this is the point where her often compelling focus on her own mental moment seemed off.  In the Rocketship chapter, Rocketship is a potential person that Waldman (unlike her husband) does not think she can bring into the world.  But now Waldman seems to be presenting a universe that doles out children like blessings and...curses? bits of shit?  What I liked about the Rocketship chapter was that it was really honest and her self-asborption was palpable.  But now (in the throes of CVS testing for child 4) the universe was saying something.

So if I ever wrote a book about parenting it would be titled: The Universe is Silent. 

And the book was lent with a promise that she has a lot of sex with her husband.  Which she may well have, but other than that bare assertion, there is little sex to be had here.

Litany of failures

Ok -- so I returned the Julia Franck book to the library 3/4 read (and overdue to boot -- a 3$ fine and I did not even like or finish the book).  If someone knows what happens to the boy left in the train staion feel free to fill me in -- but since at p. 279 Helene was not even pregnant with him yet I had to give it the heave ho.  Perhaps it would be a better book were I not so tired.  I exchanged it for David Grossman's new book To the End of the Land.  I suspect it will take more brainpower than I have in the last week of classes; we shall see.

And if you want to follow a funny/exasperating set of posts over the worst children's book in the world (The Giving Tree) then go to Andrew Sullivan's blog: http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/  It took a while for my view of this as a dangerous piece of blather about a child getting everything to the detriment of the poor tree comes out in the comments.  And my few readers will, perhaps, be relieved that I shall stay silent about the Giving Tree and Jesus. 

And tomorrow is Passover -- I can post on reading the Haggadah.....

True Journey is Return

Or so says Odo, the founder of the principles on which the planet Anarres is organized in Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed.  All I know is that there are three weeks left in the semester and time is flowing like Niagara Falls and I am Sam Patch in a barrel (Upstate NY reference -- will have to seek random [or not , wikipedia] internet link.....here!).  I am currently reading Ursula Le Guin's The Telling, but it is not working for me and I just started the quite dark and grim The Blind Side of the Heart by Julia Franck.  So far so good, not much to say yet.  My class starts reading Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower this week.  This is hardly even a blog post.....

How did one week go by?

OK, let's see -- it has been quite a week in my world and while reading is happening thinking much beyond the reading I have been doing for my class is not happening (that is The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, one of my favorite books, ever).  But I also finished the truly dreadful Witch of Hebron by James Kunstler and am dipping in and out of the T.C. Boyle short story collection Wild Child (bought for the title story, which was disappointing -- on the other hand the stroy "1300 rats" was pretty much just what you would want out of a story with that title).  So, Kunstler.  He is the author of the beautifully titled World Made by Hand.  Can a book be good if the only good thing about it is the title?  (More below on the title.)  Kunstler (peak oil man of The Long Emergency, nonfiction),  imagines life post oil, post nameless war and post various diseases, in a small town along the Hudson river north of Albany, NY.  Without oil, gasoline, electricity, communications systems and essentially every other means of modern comfort (which seems to include egalitarian gender relations) the people of Union Grove face many difficulties: the crazed and violent gang of thugs that scavenge, fail to apprecaite hard work, but allow Kunstler to offer up some pretty disgusting punishments; the disappearance of some men who went to trade in Albany; and the arrival of a quasi cult like christian group that has been moving north after facing worse difficulties in the southeastern US.  Oh I can't even go on with its silly plot.  So the Witch of Hebron continues the celebration of the simple life, of men who fish and hunt and treat their women well and women who...well, other than the witch, women who pretty much stay off the page unles their buxom boutnies are being discussed.  Kunstler, I suspect, fanstasizes of being a medieval lord -- and it is as tiresome as it sounds.

But the title -- he captures simply in a title the important feature of life post-apocalypse: that it (like life post state of nature) must be made by hand -- not because we eat slow and love our goods handmade -- but because we understand that politics, organized living together, can only be made 'by hand.'  Not by god, not by superiors, but by us.  Sadly he has ruined a perfectly good title with two novels of nonsense.

TV!

Ok, I interrupt my focus on books for a post on television.  One of my people, who is a fan of all things girls-in-the-past, has been watching the Waltons.  What a great show.  Two things I have noticed in the three episodes we have seen thus far (season 1, so long ago). First off there are elderly people in the show -- not only that, those people have actual lives: hopes and dreams -- they get angry and sad and happy.  They live lives that are rich in themselves and not simply as appendages to some other, younger, better folk.  And when I started thinking about this I wondered -- where are the elderly people on TV -- not as jokes or occasional side kicks -- but just ordinary people, who happen to be over 70?  Second thing -- the adults in this show get to have children and yet not be fully absorbed at all times by those children.  Children are shushed and shooed away and real conversations happen between real adults (ok, on TV) -- relationships are explored and, again, people get mad and talk about why they are mad and their anger is just a part of adult life -- not a tragedy, but a normal response to stress or uncertainty.  I will, I am sure, have other observations over the next few weeks (it could take us months to get through all of the seasons!).  I had tried the Waltons once before and we started with a stretch of tragedy episodes: appendicitis and Mama got polio -- my people dislikes the tragedy shows -- but this time we are on a good run of ordinary tales of people in the world (or as some who know me might note: earnest and dreary ordinary tales of people in the world.  And do I love anything more than earnest and dreary from my forms of art?  I do not.).

Now we are getting somewhere

Ok, I think I have found it: Julie Bertagna, Exodus (1st book), Zenith (second book), Aurora (forthcoming, 3rd book) -- premise -- global climate change, an island in (or what is left of) Scotland, a small community that finally recognizes that their island will not survive one more winter of rising seas.  A girl who finds record on the internet of new cities that were created above the water.  So will people follow Mara's recommendation that the islanders set out crowded into boats to find these cities in the sky?  They will (although part of what makes these books so good is that there is lots of questioning about why anyone would pay attention to a 15 year old).  But what awaits them at the city is not what anyone expected.  This postapocalyptic text eventually presents six different postapocalyptic communities -- five different responses to living in a world that is mostly under water.  These communities run the gamut of socio-political arrangements, and differing responses to these radically changing conditions.  Mara creates what is (or will be by the third book) a new community with representatives from most of the others presented.  It is not yet fully clear what shape the new community will take.  But the collection of people include a group who have lived for the last 50 years on islands underneath the far reaching stabiliazation beams of those who live in the sky, abandoned and almost feral children who are beginning to be born with webbed feet, one other survivor of Mara's home island, a boy who lived his life on a collection of lashed together ships and oil riggers, and the virtual memory/interaction of/with a boy who lives in the city in the sky.  There are children, infants and adults.  There is considerable disagreement about what to do and where to go and how to live.  And the conditions under which they live are certainly challenging.  So what the final book should have is a set of principles for how this disparate group can come together and live in such a way that they will not simply begin the next cycle of humans destroying the earth. 

Am now working on the sequel to James Howard Kunstler's World Made by Hand -- which, despite its most excellent title, was truly awful.  The sequel is so far proving to be equally medieval fantasy.  And so far no takers for reading The Years of Rice and Salt together.  (784 pages but you can get a  used copy for only one penny!)

What I want out of my postapocalyptic tale....

...is not what I got in Sigrid Nunez's Salvation City.  (Just a moment of self-congratualtion -- that would be my first successful blog link -- thank you to Alison for telling me how.)  Salavation City is a town in southern Indiana that has suffered less from the impact of a world-wide flu pandemic.  Cole is rescued from an orphanage by Preacher Wyatt and comes to live in his evangelical home after both of Cole's parents have died from the flu.  The book seems to want to pose the liberal atheism of Cole's parents against the warm evangelicalism (with some dark under-roots) of the Wyatt's.  But in all the book is disappointing.  First off, don't tell me this is about a world post-flu pandemic and then give me virtually no details about what has happened in this new world (one mention of an emaciated President (female!) 10 days after surviving her own bout of flu) -- but no discussion at all on the impact this pandemic has on government services, democratic values, transportation systems, food distribution or any of the other postapocalyptic details I seek.  The people of Salavation City seem to be waiting for the rapture and their doing better from the pandemic itself is either because they are nicer to each other or because they are isolated.  Cole seems less interested in their religion (although he tries) and similalry distanced from the memory of parents that did not seem so great anyway (is this just the truthful voice of a young teen ?  I was wholly unconvinced when he expressed sadness over their deaths because he quite convincingly describes his parents as distant, demanding, cold and isolated).  Eventually other things happen -- but nothing so interesting to report here....

I am now reading (actually re-reading, but it took me 125 pages to figure this out) Sharp North.  It starts out quite well in a small community in a northern woods somewhere responsible for a system of electricity generators.  There is certainly mystery and drowning cities and plans for revising the world (both the world we are in and the one we have lost).  But it too is still not quite what I want.

So what do I want: an event, survivors, a system for thinking through how to live not just for next week but for the next years and generations.  With enough potential threats to keep thinngs moving along -- but no zombies and no cannibals.  I want an explanation of how to rebuild and I want evidence that such a rebuilding makes sense.  And I want this from a protagonist who is not particulalry heroic in a world where being strong and smart may not be the key to survival.  So reader....any suggestions?

Worldbuilding

So I have finished Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi.  I have had WindUp Girl on my bookshelf for awhile now (I got through the first few chapters last semester and then the hectic semester schedule and my inability to read more than 2-3 pages without falling asleep meant it sits there still).  But this was a good return to his writing.  I taught the story "The People of Sand and Slag" last spring and let's just say that he has an incredible eye for describing dystopian futures.  Ship Breaker is set on a drowned gulf coast and the main characters work at stripping the rusting hulk like remains of container ships, oil tankers and the like.  Nailer, the protagnoist, works light crew -- meaning that he climbs into tiny spaces to pull out copper wiring , helping to produce bits of salvage brought in by other memebers of his crew to meet their daily quota. 

I liked the first half best, which detailed Nailer's life, his work, his abusive, drug-addicted father, the "half-men" -- genetic mixes of humans, dogs, tigers -- bred to protect those who pay the shipbreakers for their dead end work.  Nailer's greatest hope is either to make it to heavy crew (unlikely for his size) or to make his own "lucky strike" -- to happen on some pocket of oil or stash of salvage large enough to establish him as a dealer in salvage and not just a scrapper for salvage.  The second half takes up Nailer's possible lucky strike and love interest a "swank" whose gleaming white clipper ship wrecks near Nailer's beach during a "city-killer," a massive category 6 (8?) hurricane.

The upshot for me:  great worldbuilding, excellent dystopian details (you can't swim in oil -- true?  who knows, but visions of drowning in oil were very clearly outlined), and a satisfying ending.  An added plus -- good musings on the meaning of family and the meaning of obligation and promise. So now I will return to Wind Up Girl at some point (but still, still I want to reread The Years of Rice and Salt -- any takers?

Accomodation and paying the rent

So I have finished my re-reading jag and received 3 new books in the mail.  Next up will be Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker.  But since I have only read the first 5 pages this post is about The Children of God and the Octavia Butler short story "Bloodchild" and my emerging interest in how we (can? do? should?) expand our understanding of what it means to live together fruitfully: how do we sustain real community?  What I liked about this reread of CoG was the in your face recognition of how difficult community can be and the myriad ways in which we divide from one another -- over misunderstandings and legitimate concerns (as, for example, when one member of the community subists by eating the other).  And we divide over how we can live with one another -- what will be the conditions of that living together?  How shall we distribute what might be scarce and share what we might rather foist on someone else?  And what if those basic conditions simply suck?  Can we still think about justice under circumstances where mere survival (or even revenge) seem ever present? 

So in Butler's story, humans have arrived on a distant planet right about the same time the dominant inhabitants of that planet have realized that their gestational practice of using the bodies of a local gazelle like creature were not working.  And so the humans arrive and their appropriateness as possible host bodies for alien worm/slug babies (who can be removed before any 'eat your way out of the womb' moment -- can be, but timing matters).  The story concerns a second generation human who has been raised with the knowledge of what he will do, but no real experience of what this means.  After he witnesses a less than ideal birth situation he demands of his alien impregnator that the aliens really explain the birthing system and give the humans a chance to really choose the life to which they are now bound.  The story is not particularly hopeful; Butler notes in a commentary that she meant the story both to counter the usual colonizing voctories of science fiction tales (as does CoG) but also that the story is about "paying the rent." (As is CoG.)

Now this is one of my moments of being a someone obtuse political science professor.  I teach the "Bloodchild" story every semester and every semester we talk about paying the rent and in the back of my head is this little voice saying:  to whom is the rent being paid?  Who set the price?  What is being rented?  And my literal fixation on the metaphorical ties me up in knots.  But I try and work through these moments, relying on my students who are often far more innovative readers than I.  But last night while finishing CoG I thought that in fact that book is about paying the rent: the obligations we owe to those whose space we inhabit.  And what science fiction can do is expand our mind to think about how we accomodate ourselves to the lives and living spaces of those with whom we are thrown together -- by will or force or chance. 

More Mary Doria Russell

Ok, so I have not finished my re-reading of Children of God and I think I should save most of my comments for both together, but I will make a few observations here.  First off what I have always really liked about these books is that first: it thinks through exploration in this very particular way.  My children have been studying explorers for the last few months and the attitude of seeing something for the first time is tied right up with the presumption that wreaking havoc on the people you encounter along the way is just the price you pay.  So these novels take up that price setting issue from a group of people that are trying really hard not to pay the kind of price colonizers and explorers have paid in the past.  Secondly I also think that the novels get something about friendship and conversation right -- not that we are all so very clever -- but that conversation is the foundation of human interaction in important weays and the characters here have great, ordinary conversations.  (Then there is a whole god, spirituality theme that I find much less interesting.)  So next week -- a more focused analysis, paying particular attention to the depiction of vulnerability -- my newest interest.

I will not share (yet again) my thoughts on either Thomas More's Utopia or Edward Bellamy;s Looking Backward as school reading is not the focus of this blog...

A slow week.

Ok, really, once a week

So I said once a week and then I lost my blog.  But Alison told me how to find it again and here I am.

This week:
Jonathan Franzen -- Freedom
 I read this on an endless flight to and from San Francisco.  Everyone who says it is readability is right -- while the characters are depressed/depressing and capable of making some of the world's worst (yet completely ordinary) life choices, the book has a nice flow.  I started out truly disliking Patty -- but the book does a good job of telling her story from enough standpoints that you can see not only why but how she ended up where she does.  Her son is about as unlikeable a human being as I have read about, and does little to challenge my dislike of a certain privileged shit of a white boy, and little is endearing in Patty's refusal to see her son for the shot that he is (and his supposed redepmption is unbeleivable as is his continued marriage to the blank slate girl next door. 

Michael Grant --Gone
Totally misleading and fairly stupid.  All the adults disappear -- kids left alone, what will they do??  I hate fantasy that pretends to be science fiction.  What seemed as if it should be a good young adult postapocalyptic account is instead some sort of supernatural nonsense with  a little Hobbes and a lot of Lord of the Flies.

Currently re-reading
Mary-Doria Russell -- The Sparrow
so every few years or so I change the book that I reread most often.  When I was in college it was John Irving's World according to Garp, then there was a grad school gap when I stopped reading ....I was going to say for pleasure, but that is not quite right...I guess I just stopped reading fiction.  Then when I started reading novels again it was almost anything by David Lodge.  And then A.S Byatt's Babel Tower.  So Now I am in a Sparrow, Children of God repeat.  But I'll have to blog about that when I finish this re-read.

winter break reading

Over this winter break I read:

Anita Shreve -- forgot the title and the plot....

Julia Glass -- A Widower's Tale -- not bad, I liked the protagonist.

Joyce Maynard -- The Good Daughters -- two birthday sisters -- born on the same day in New Hampshire -- about halfway through I thought top myself: do I in fact care what will happen to these sisters and isn;t it obvious to everyone that they were switched at birth?  But there were further twists and the last 1/2 waqs more interesting than the first.

Scott Westerfield -- The Uglies.  I like postapocalyptic and dystopian fiction and this often pops up on lists.  Its appeal to an adult is less clear -- while I am sympathetic to the idea of a world that gives everyone plastic surgery at age 16 to make all equally beautiful, as a premise for dystopian fiction it is fairly slight.

David Wroblowski -- The Story of Edgar Sawtelle -- I quite liked this.  The dog stuff was compelling and most of the first 3/4 was really good.  And then I thought it fell apart.

I may have read something else -- I would have to check the bedside table....

A new blog!

For years I have said that I would start writing down what I have been reading and what I think of it.  But then I never do and now I can never remember what that book was with the guys in Florida who invented the new kind of amusement park or if I actually read that Anita Shreve book or not.  So here I will blog at least once a week about what I have been reading.